Project: Metalbeast

Project: Metalbeast aka Project: Metalbeast: DNA Overload (1995)

Dir: Alessandro De Gaetano

Written by Alessandro De Gaetano, Timothy E. Sabo, Roger Steinmann

Starring Kim Delaney, Barry Bostwick, John Marzilli, and Kane Hodder

Considering the movie is called... (checks notes) PROJECT: METALBEAST?!  oh dear god I've wasted my life! I could die tomorrow and they’d say at my funeral that I spent my last night on earth watching a movie called fucking PROJECT: METALBEST, sometimes officially subtitled PROJECT: METALBEAST: DNA OVERLOAD though I thank merciful Zeus that wasn’t the on-screen title of the version I saw, but still, Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with me, civilization is collapsing around us and my response is I intentionally select and watch the entirety of PROJECT: METALBEAST!? I live in an age of unprecedented access to the entire pantheon of human achievement! I have every word ever published by Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Hemingway and Hugo, Austen and Joyce at my beck and call! I could delve into the works of Confucius or Kant! I have access to depth and breadth of knowledge undreamt of by monarchs and conquerors a century before my birth! And what do I fucking do with my miserable life, ending, inexorably, second by irreplaceable second? PROJECT: fucking METABLEAST. [Spirals downward into existential despair]

Anyway, as I was saying, for a movie called PROJECT: METALBEAST, this starts off encouragingly, immediately introducing us to two tough-looking guys obviously on some kind of tough guy mission in the wilderness. For context, it provides the following on-screen text in that universally recognized “military typewriter font” which appears in movies and nowhere else in history:

·         Project: Operation Lycanthropus
·         Agency: US Military Intelligence
·         Destination: Carpathian Mountains, Hungary
·         Objective: Sample werewolf blood

That would be enough just by itself to let us know everything we need, but it goes on to add the extraneous:

·         Purpose: Create superior combat agent

As if "Sample werewolf blood" wasn't a sufficient purpose all on its own.

One of the two toughs is Butler (intense-looking enjoyable overactor John Marzilli [The Secret World Of Alex Mack, a 1984 episode of Cheers]) and the other we needn’t worry ourselves with, because he ain’t gonna be around for long. If the text is correct –and we will quickly find out that at least the werewolf part definitely is—they are in the Carpathian Mountains, where they speedily make their way to an obviously werewolf-infested structure and encounter an impressively swole werewolf (Kane Hodder!) who is summarily dispatched with silver bullets and has his blood sampled. So far so good, all according to plan! Oh, those bean-counters back in Washington might have rolled their eyes at spending millions of taxpayer dollars on Operation Lycanthropus. They might have said it was unwise, perhaps even asinine, to travel to the Carpathian Mountains, Hungary, to sample werewolf blood for the purpose of creating a superior combat agent! But who’s laughing now, you pencil-necked Liberal bureaucrats?!

All this is supposed to take place in 1975, by the way. Hard to believe Gerald Ford thought this was a good idea, but maybe it was one of those Nixon-approved schemes which took a few years to get off the ground.

Anyway, we got another PROMETHEUS situation here: nobody says holy shit, werewolves are real, this could revolutionize our entire understanding of biology, not to mention philosophy, the human soul, and mankind’s place in the universe. Instead, they’re just mad they can’t get their werewolf-juiced super-soldier, like, today. Butler, in particular, seems to think if they can’t have a lycanthropic Captain America up and running by brunch tomorrow, America is almost certainly going to be defeated by the forces of communist homosexual decadence. And so when the scientists tell him it’s going to take a day or two to run tests on the mysterious blood (which they don’t know is from a werewolf, a fact which might have hurried them along) Butler goes ballistic and injects himself with the remaining blood. This immediately results in him turning into a werewolf and going on a rampage. Which, of course it does, what the fuck did you think was going to happen, Butler? I mean, you personally took this blood from an actual, living breathing jacked-up ‘roided-out Carpathian werewolf! Always think, man, before you inject yourself with supernatural blood! Real rookie error in my opinion.

Fortunately Butler’s boss, the shifty Colonel who I briefly thought was named “Millie” but turns out to be named Miller (Barry Bostwick –yes, the Barry Bostwick! Beloved star of stage and screen Barry Bostwick from Spin City and what have you*), knows what’s up and quickly puts a couple silver bullets in Butler. I guess he must have seen this coming, or at least had some silver bullets handy for some other reason.

That’s a movie’s worth of werewolf plot right there, but it’s actually only 21 minutes and 30 second of screen time, kinda a complete little mini-movie to set the tone, like the opening of the 2009 FRIDAY THE 13th. We then skip ahead 20 years to the present (1995), where we learn that Miller has secretly stashed Butler’s nude silver-bullet-riddled corpse in a hidden lab, which --yes ladies-- means the villain from The Secret World Of Alex Mack goes full frontal, a nice little bonus for you. You see, Miller learned a valuable lesson from Operation Lycanthropus. Not, of course, that injecting psychotic Nixon-era special ops commandos with werewolf blood is an impractical idea. No, no, the theory is sound, obviously. The problem is that the resulting homicidal werewolf doesn’t have skin as hard as steel. That’s the real snag here. But wouldn’t you know it, in 1995 there’s a lab full of another group of government scientists who are looking for cadavers to practice skin grafts on. Only problem is, the process so far has resulted in all the grafts turning as hard as steel. Well that’s serendipitous! And so, Project: Metalbeast, as the new project is presumably unofficially known exclusively in the head of Colonel Miller, is born!

Unfortunately, as the movie re-starts with a new cast, the break-neck momentum of the first 20 minutes comes to a screeching halt, and we’re left to get introduced to a new generation of scientists led by Dr. Anna de Carlo (Kim Delaney – yeah, the NYPD Blue lady! Also she was in Brian de Palma’s MISSION TO MARS apparently, just five years after this?). Dr. de Carlo is going to be our new protagonist, but unfortunately will serve as something closer to the audience’s antagonist, because she is the one frustratingly factor standing between us and our promised METALBEAST. You see, she doesn’t trust Colonel Miller and doesn’t like that the handy cadaver he has provided for her project has incomplete paperwork. Now, she’s right, of course; the paperwork is bogus, and this guy is sketchy as hell, and in point of fact is trying to unleash a homicidal, vengeance-minded steel-skinned unkillable METALBEAST on them. But which would you rather watch, a movie about a homicidal, vengeance-minded steel-skinned unkillable METALBEAST wreaking havoc, or a movie about a low-level deep-state bureaucrat dragging their feet on a series of biology experiments through an intra-office dispute over incomplete paperwork? Because the movie bets it all on the latter. Not wisely, in my estimation.

See people, this is why everyone hates Liberals. Sure, they might be right, but crazy old uncle Trump, oops, I mean Miller, says we’re allowed to have fun and stay up late and eat all the candy we want and if we want to unleash a homicidal unkillable METALBEAST on the unsuspecting world, that’s our RIGHT as Americans goddamit. And hey, if some people end up dead, there’s always a tax cut to sooth the pain.

Anyway, this argument over proper paperwork for scientific specimens is just blatant anti-entertainment, made even worse by the movie’s general ability to be competent enough that it’s boring. The acting is fine, the production value is passable, the cinematography (by Thomas Callaway, FEAST and an impressive number of direct-to-video sequels including SLC PUNK 2,  CRUEL INTENTION 3 and CRITTERS 4) is adequate and even stylish on occasion.** The sound mix on the version I saw is absolute dogshit, thanks Amazon, but that’s more of an annoyance than a charming foible. So there’s not even anything to enjoy ironically as we slowly, inevitably drag ourselves through nearly 40 minutes before we get a METALBEAST up and running. The only thing that kept me going is the unspoken but unmissable sexual tension between Dr. de Carlo and Female Scientist #2 (Musetta Vander, wow, O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?, WILD WILD WEST, and MANSQUITO?! Plus music videos for Alice Cooper, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Chris Isaac and Tina Turner?!). Oh sure, de Carlo has a supposed love interest who looks like Michael Dudikoff but isn’t (Dean Scofield, a regular voice in the Metal Gear Solid games plus Don Coscarellli’s SURVIVAL QUEST and supporting the real Michael Dudikoff in BLACK THUNDER) but watch these women together. The little gestures, the lingering eye contact, the brief but significant touching. At one point, de Carlo kisses her co-worker lightly on the head after she comes up with some petty exposition. Don’t try and tell me that’s just being a friendly office mate, even in an office so close that you’d feel comfortable going into the meat locker and sadly caressing the corpse of a co-worker who has been hideously mauled by some kind of beast, possibly a METALBEAST, which also happens. This is chemistry. That guy who looks like Michael Dudikoff has no idea what he's in the middle of. None of this turns out to be important or interesting or even stated aloud, obviously, but it does provide a little color during a 40-minute stretch which really struggles to get much drama going.

See what I mean?

Also, I don't know where else to address this, but there's a minor subplot about how the wacky Latino chef (Mario Burgos, no other credits) in their surprisingly elaborate government kitchen (?) is going on strike until they sprinkle the place with holy water (??). There's even a line about how they tried to fool him by using regular water, but he caught on (???). This is never really a relevant plot point, but it comes up a couple times and I feel it must be vital to understanding the rich thematic tapestry that PROJECT: METALBEAST is weaving. 

Anyway, eventually we do get our METALBEAST, and it’s pretty rad, although I have to admit it doesn't quite turn out to be what I had in mind. I was imagining kind of a cyborg werewolf thing, and that’s not exactly what we get; remember, this is just a normal everyday run-of-the-mill werewolf covered in transplanted skin that for some totally valid scientific reason turns as hard as steel, so he’s not a robot or anything, just sort of a weird shiny werewolf who now has glowing red eyes (not sure how that happened) and bristly spines that make him look sort of like a were-porcupine (not sure how that happened, either). He doesn't look exactly like he's made of metal, though he does make metal sound effects when he walks, so there's that. But he looks pretty cool, and you get to see him a good bit. Perhaps recognizing his big namesake movie is really starting to sag, he immediately picks up where he left off back in 1975 and gets right down to the business of murdering everyone in sight. But there are apparently only four or five people who work here so it’s not exactly the wall-to-wall bloodbath that it would have to be to make it worth sitting through 40 minutes of departmental meetings about proper bureaucratic procedural protocol. Still, a METALBEAST was promised, a METALBEAST was delivered, and in fairness to them they have a pretty good plan to dispose of it: silver bullets aren’t going to make it through its MIGHTY METAL SKIN, so they melt down their boss’s antique silver coin collection which he keeps in the office (?) and mold themselves some silver-tipped bazooka rounds. That oughtta do it. With style.

A movie called PROJECT: METALBEAST could probably use a little more cheerful extravagance like that, but there’s enough here to make for a reasonably painless watch. At the very least, the movie is a timely warning about the dangers of injecting American soldiers with werewolf blood to create supersoliders, and then when they go berserk and murder everybody, freezing them nude in a secret lab for twenty years until the technology is developed to give them invulnerable metal skin. Frankly I’m a little peeved that my tax money went to pay for all that. Thankfully there are responsible, thoughtful citizens willing to speak out against this kind of shenanigan. And yes, I’m talking about the deep state: professional, honest civil servants who ensure that these kinds of excesses are kept in check the only way a huge organization is capable of controlling excess: through transparent, consistent protocol.

Yes sir, if we’re ever going to get saved, it’s not going to be by werewolf supersoldiers; it’s gonna be by honest technocrats making sure the paperwork is done right. And this review is a salute to them.

But that doesn’t mean I want to watch them work. If I’m going to throw precious hours of my life away watching low-budget Canadian garbage, I’d at least like to get more METALBEAST than tales of sensible governance, please.

PS: Also, for fucks sake, shouldn't there be a little metal on this soundtrack? I know the beast is literally metal, or at least as hard as metal and I get that PROJECT: THE BEAST WITH REALLY HARD SKIN doesn't have the same ring to it, but come on, you know what I expected with a title like that. Be a pal and throw some Dokken or something in there next time, guys.

*Also ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, but equally also WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S II, HANNAH MONTANA: THE MOVIE, IN THE HEAT OF PASSION II: UNFAITHFUL, THE SCORPION KING IV: QUEST FOR POWER, plus he had a voice role in the American dub of FANTASTIC PLANET and had guest roles on literally every American and Canadian TV series 1979-present.

** The score feels genuinely professional, boldly stating aloud that this is all much more exciting than it actually is, and occasionally almost able to convince you. Turns out it’s by a guy who would at least go on to be a genuine professional, one Conrad Pope, who did scores for PAVILION OF WOMEN, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, and TIM’S VERMEER, among with schlock like Billy Zane’s THE SET UP and the Alessandro De Gaetano-scripted NEOWOLF. But he’s better known as an orchestrator, a job he held on everything from THE CARE BEARS MOVIE to SCHINDLER’S LIST, the STAR WARS prequels, and most of the HARRY POTTER movies! Even VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS! Wow! What a meteoric rise!

Lords Of Chaos

Lords of Chaos (2019)

Dir Jonas Åkerlund

Written by Dennis Magnusson, Jonas Åkerlund

Starring Rory Culkin, Emory Cohen, Sky Ferreira, Jack Kilmer

LORDS OF CHAOS is ostensibly a musical biopic centering on the rise and fall of "True Norwegian Black Metal" band Mayhem (they always say the whole phrase, every time), who rose from humble beginnings to become kings of a tiny subculture of disaffected, angry youths, only to then become victims of that same community's downward spiral into hatred and violence. And it IS that story, though a telling of it which is almost palpably disinterested in the music which theoretically sits at its center. But it also works as a broad, mildly satirical examination of how angry young men ruin the things they ostensibly love. Which is to say, how pathetic posers escalate into dangerous zealots. With a few details swapped, this could be the story of everything from ISIS recruits to people sending rape threats over STAR WARS sequels. It's not an elegant beast, but it does effectively and mercilessly articulate that particular tale of woe, which sadly feels especially relevant right now.

The plot is a fairly straightforward rise-and-fall template. We begin with the creation of the band Mayhem, by guitarist Øystein Aarseth (Rory Culkin, SIGNS) --better known (to the kind of people who would watch this movie, anyway) by his metal name, Euronymous-- an auspicious moment in metal history made slightly less so by the fact that it occurs in his middle-class parents’ basement. Mayhem eventually recruits troubled Swedish singer “Dead” (Jack Kilmer, son of Val, THE NICE GUYS) and become the center of a burgeoning Norwegian black metal scene, until “Dead” commits suicide. Euronymous, upon finding his body, sees a straight shot to the kind of infamy which will boost his band’s capital, and photographs the corpse for the cover of their debut album. The strategy works, and Euronymous sets himself up as the leader of a devoted local scene called “The Black Circle,” opening his own record shop (with his parents’ money) to use as a lair. But things begin to fall apart after awkward outcast Varg (Emory Cohen, THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES) shows up on the scene and starts taking Euronymous’ shock-bait philosophy seriously, escalating the group to arson and murder.

            In its details, it is a fairly simple thing. It’s based on, as the opening intertitles tell us, “the truth, and lies, and what really happened.” I’m not really sure what that means, but it imparts a good sense almost immediately of the kind of snarky tone the movie wants to cultivate. More specifically, it’s based on the nonfiction book of the same title, a fact which seems more relevant, but perhaps less important. It is based on a true story (and seems quite faithful to the basic facts of that story) but objective journalistic accuracy is less important here than tone. The movie is not intended as a piece of dispassionate reportage; it clearly sets out with an explicit goal to demythologize the larger-than-life music scene it’s depicting. And “demythologizing” means something rather specific in this case. Most musical biopics --if they bother at all-- try to do that with a “warts and all” approach, wherein we see the musical icon at their worst, as well as their best. But in this case that wouldn’t work, because the denizens of the particular subculture we encounter here were trying their damndest to look “evil,” and would be most proud of their worst moments. So instead, LORDS OF CHAOS adopts a different strategy. It offers the familiar highs and lows, sure, but it lingers on the mundane in a way that reveals the most shameful truth imaginable for a bunch of hardcore satanist metal junkies: they were all a bunch of dorks.

            On the surface, the plot sounds pretty intense, and from time to time it is; there’s a bluntness to the occasional violence which is genuinely shocking, and the film effectively conveys the sense of panic that descends upon Euronymous as Varg starts to drag his little community into violent madness. But the movie finds its real reason for being in the downtime between the tragedies: Euronymous trying to look scary for a photo sessions after having his little sister help him dye his hair, Varg stumbling through a poorly-thought-through interview with an unimpressed journalist, the “black circle” pathetically trying to look tough and one-up each, convincing their parents to pay for it all. It doesn’t make fun of them, exactly; it just offers a brutally honest portrait, and trusts that they’ll make fools of themselves without the film needing to do anything at all. Which they eagerly and enthusiastically do. It has not an ounce of respect for them, though it does have an understated but crucial sliver of affection for them, in all their moronic enthusiasm. They may be dumb, but they are just kids, after all, and their follies are the follies of misspent youth… until they aren’t anymore.

Director Jonas Åkerlund is best known as a music video director (he's worked with everyone from Madonna to Rammstein), and there's a little bit of that frantic style everyone used to associate with music videos in here, probably not to the movie's benefit. There are some semi-cheesy stylistic affectations, ranging from the film's smirking voiceover narration to some corny avid-fart horror imagery. But it does get the most important thing right: it truly understands these heavy metal dorks, fundamentally gets who they are, what they want. Åkerlund himself is a Swedish-born former heavy metal drummer (for extreme metal band Bathory) who spent his formative years in the same circles and clearly knows the culture inside and out in a way no outsider would be able to. The movie, by extension, absolutely understands why the kids were attracted to something like this, intuitively grasps what's cool about metal, and, hell, to a certain extent embodies actually those things itself. The idea that anyone except total squares wouldn’t think corpse paint and blast beats are inherently awesome doesn’t even cross its mind; no character needs to explain aloud that this music is blowing their mind, because that’s assumed. It has not the slightest shame in trafficking in metal iconography and horror movie tropes, sees no irony at all in acknowledging that while church burning is clearly a bad thing, it is an awesome and totally metal visual.

I mean, I'm against arson and everything, but come on.

 But in understanding that, it is also relentlessly unromantic about how dumb and lame these dorks were, even at their very darkest moments. The movie is, at its very core, an exploration of the contrast between the epic fantasy of extreme art and the banality of real life. It suggests that Euronymous’ original sin was to blur the line between those two, ushering in a dissociative fiction which gradually metastasized into something deadly. But never into something cool. There’s nothing lamer than someone who just misses the point, who doesn’t get it, no matter how far they push. Varg, as dangerous and vicious as he will reveal himself to be, is the object of scorn more often than fear; he’s a pathetic figure, a desperate wannabe who wanted to be so badly that he actually became the thing that everyone else was smart enough to know was a irresponsible fantasy, not an actual way of life. Even when he’s committing a brutal murder, we’re invited to laugh at his self-conscious tough guy posturing and his laughable ineptitude. And it’s an ugly, slow murder; Åkerlund doesn’t skimp over the nastiness of what Varg is doing, it just denies him the only thing he actually cares about: his image as a badass. He strips him of his fantasy of himself as a cold-blooded warrior, and reveals the bumbling, needy child lashing out that he really is. He may think he’s Hannibal Lecter, but the movie makes it clear he’s just an angry Napoleon Dynamite.

This feels like an especially vital strategy on today of all days. I’m writing this on March 15, 2019, a date that will probably not mean much to anyone reading this in the future, but which happens to have dawned with the headline “49 killed in terrorist attack at mosques in New Zealand.” And that date probably won’t mean anything to you in the future because by then we’ll have seen a dozen more headlines just like it. Angry young men becoming murderous young men is a sickeningly pervasive part of life these days, and that adds an awful urgency to a story about people who, in a happier world, we wouldn’t need to think much about. If these Mayhem assholes were just an isolated aberration, it wouldn’t feel so necessary to try to dig into them. But this snapshot of the groping death spiral of a subculture back in the 90’s feels like the first modern stirring of the now-tragically-common impulse for niche subcultures to “radicalize” --I don’t think we even had that word back then-- and end up visiting their murderous fantasies on the real world. Varg’s chosen name even means “Lone wolf,” the name we have taken to calling these sorts of killers. And now is as good a time as any to say it: though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from watching the movie, Varg was, and remains --you guessed it-- a hardcore white nationalist, and today is probably better known for that than for his terrible music. Mayhem may not have been patient zero for this kind of ideology (and as far as I can tell the rest of the band didn’t share his politics), but they’re certainly emblematic of a rising tide of forces which have spent the last 30 years twisting typical obnoxious teenage rebellion into murderous hate. And that tide is showing no signs of ebbing.

We’ve got to talk about these guys, we can’t afford not to. But the danger in doing that is that you end up giving them exactly what they want -- attention, a platform, an audience. For a normal person, being portrayed as a dangerous, vicious psychopath would be an insult, but for these fuck-os, it feeds into their narcissism and their desperate need to be, if not respected, at least feared. At least taken seriously.

That’s the brilliance of Åkerlund’s approach. If there’s one thing here that only a filmmaker with some real roots in the metal community would have known to do, it’s how he portrays these assholes in the one way which is absolutely guaranteed not to feed their ego. Åkerlund acknowledges the harm that scumbags like Varg are capable of. But he refuses to take them seriously. Because they’re not worth taking seriously. Their ideas are not worth debating, their art is shallow and juvenile, their philosophy is a joke. They don’t deserve to be psychologically probed, they deserve to be mocked. And the best way of doing that is to strip away their self-aggrandizing personas to reveal what bumbling, dull losers they are. Dangerous, sometimes, but only in the most banal, pathetic sort of way. They’d never object to being portrayed as evil, vicious scumbags, but they hate being portrayed as shallow, preening chumps (and just in case you had your doubts, the remaining band members regarded the film as a “big fuck you,” which it most certainly is. Varg himself* called it “character murder,” which is fucking rich coming from an actual murderer, and was especially incensed about the movie’s brilliant alpha dog move of casting a Jewish actor as him. Only a movie that really understood these guys would be able to get under their skin this badly, which is a noble enough goal to make it entirely worth making the movie even if it had no other artistic merit of any kind).  

Not everyone seemed to understand that approach: “Åkerlund likes the immediacy of an awful act….But there’s also an unmistakable tone of jokey disdain for hollow youth... Ultimately it all adds up to a hodgepodge of styles and attitudes with hardly any insight into what made this corrosive clique so magnetic to its adherents,” complained the LA Times’ Robert Abele. But that misses the whole point; it’s the hollowness and the strange, stupid naïveté of it all that explains the whole thing. The lack of insight is the insight, because there’s nothing especially interesting or well-thought-through about any of this. None of it was necessary, none of it was inevitable, it was just something dumb that happened when a bunch of dumbasses competing with each other got out of control because everyone involved was too self-interested and shallow to stop it. Remember: metalheads are the jocks of the musical world. Affording these guys the dignity of prying into their psyche would be an insult to their victims. They were just dumb, selfish young men, and, as will happen when such a group gets together, one thing led to another. Their motives were as shallow as their philosophy, and worthy of about the same cursory level of scrutiny.

And yet, we do need to stop this kind of tragedy in the future, and so the film invites us to wonder, who is responsible? Is Euronymous actually Donald Trump, a vain, cowardly poser whose phony tough-guy stance ends up inspiring guys like Varg --or the New Zealand shooter-- to go out and live their violent ethos for real? Or is he more like (one possible reading of) the central character in AMERICAN SNIPER, a fundamentally sensitive soul trapped in a brittle, macho ethos which he lacks the emotional tools to adequately challenge as a poisonous fantasy, and who ends up perpetuating that very ethos because it’s become too intrinsic a part of his identity for him to know how to do anything else? Perhaps overly generously, Åkerlund and (especially) Culkin seem to see Euronymous as the latter, and do their best to let us read his “evil” posturing as a symptom of his insecurity and inability to deal with the trauma of his friend’s suicide. Culkin called him “a bit of a sweetheart” and strongly implies with his performances that Euronymous’ violent rhetoric and nihilist front was a put-on, a harmless geek show that ended up getting away from him, at worst a somewhat irresponsible cover for a needy kid who doesn’t know how to appropriately express his feelings.

 But of course, that diagnosis (minus the “sweetheart”) could describe Varg just as easily, and the movie mercilessly tracks his descent from pathetic reject to cold-blooded killer. Euronymous may not have meant any harm, and he may have been a benign little weasel with just enough savvy to understand that shock tactics bring attention. But it’s kind of hard to let him off the hook when his actions had so many real-world consequences that he never took any responsibility for. One of those real-world consequences eventually affected him directly (making this a rare case of an instigator who also ended up a victim), but even this sympathetic portrayal seems to openly acknowledge that he shares a lot of the blame here. None of this would have happened without him. Hate-fueled killers feed off the claptrap of phony self-interested con men like Euronymous, from politicians to preachers to TV talking heads and internet agitators, amoral hustlers all, who see an easy mark in the the beta-male outcasts who transform their self-serving bullshit into true hate. They’re charlatans, not true believers, but you don’t get to duck the responsibility for your actions just because you’re a transparent fraud. It’s easier to have some sympathy for Euronymous, who, after all, was only a fucking kid, and even at the end doesn’t seem to quite understand what he’s unleashed. But still, he set this in motion, he kept it going, and he was perfectly happy to enjoy the benefits of notoriety even after the harm it was doing was perfectly clear.  

Which forces me to ask: am I part of the problem too? After all, you know what these assholes have in common? They look like me. They came from the same background I came from. They watch the same movies, dig the same music, run in the same circles. I was once a teenage asshole who thought he was edgy, too. I wasn’t a black metal guy myself, but is being into over-the-top provocative movies that much different from being into over-the-top provocative music? Am I, thinking I’m being a perfectly harmless little shithead, actually just as guilty as Euronymous in aggrandizing a culture and a fantasy which has disastrous real-world consequences? Are those guys a frustrating persistent bug in the system, or do we need to start worrying that they’re actually a feature?  

There was a time when I was a evangelical free-speech absolutist, and the answer to these questions was a simple one: no, you don’t have to feel responsible for whatever wrong idea some nutcase takes from your art, and no, you don’t need to apologize for the art you enjoy. Scorsese has no responsibility for John Hinckley, DIRTY HARRY doesn’t owe the world a good moral lesson, Venom (the extreme metal band, not the beloved Tom Hardy film) --referenced by both Euronymous and Varg-- isn’t to blame if a few demented fans don’t understand their whole Satanism schtick is an act, just a logical next stop in the footsteps of Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne. Art doesn't kill people; people kill people. And after all, before we start fretting about violent lyrics and swear words, let’s not forget that we already had a moral panic about heavy metal music, and we lived to regret it; in fact, in 1993, the Satanic Panic which heartlessly pathologized the genre and persecuted its dumb, harmless fans was still in full swing. The West Memphis Three were convicted the next year. Metalheads really are mostly sweethearts, and their lives are already hard enough due to their poor social skills and terrible taste in music (just kidding, metalheads. You know I love you). It's unfair and harmful to demonize them and treat them with suspicion just because they like bands with names like Darkthrone or Napalm Death. And besides, fantasy, including (and perhaps especially!) anti-social fantasy, is part of the human experience, and it’s something that we intrinsically demonize at our great peril.

That side was always easy for me to see. And I still see it, obviously, especially where the law is concerned. But there’s another side that didn’t come as easily (the side that, I think it’s worth saying, seldom comes easily to people who come from some degree of social and economic privilege): art, fantasy, and speech are slippery things, never as comfortably abstract and removed from reality as they sound. Art is important, fantasy is important, speech is important, precisely because they are not some benign aesthetic thing independent of the real world. They wouldn’t be worth fighting for if they were. These are powerful, vital tools that we use to shape our understanding of ourselves and the reality we inhabit, and consequently they have tremendous power to influence people and cultures in profoundly negative ways, both maliciously and through casual indifference. Art can hurt. Fantasy can kill. Speech can oppress. All freedom has a cost, and that cost is often paid by someone else, most likely someone who is already a target for one reason or another (it’s no coincidence that the first victim of violence here is a gay man; insecure assholes will always kick the suffering down, because it’s safer than directing their anger at someone who might actually deserve it). Once upon a time, maybe even as recently as 1993, an artist --or anyway, a white, male artist of modest economic privilege-- was typically asked only to look inwardly, to draw something from inside and release it out into the world. It’s an appealing perspective for an artist, affording endless personal freedom and demanding no accountability. But it’s a myopia we can ill-afford anymore. If we embraced it in ignorance once, we cannot claim to do so any longer. The act of creation alters the world, and no one wielding the power to do that has the right to shirk the responsibility that power imparts upon them.

 But of course, the power of art to shape reality is never a simple linear thing. Art that’s very bad for one person may be very good for someone else, and, anyway, however benign and prosocial you might try and make your art, there’s always gonna be some nut who takes the wrong idea from it. The point is not that art should only depict good morals, or that it needs to relate directly to reality at all. In fact, the point is not really about art at all. It’s about people. We’ve got to be aware of what we’re putting out into the world because we have a responsibility to our fellow humans, and a shared investment in helping to guide them --individually and as a culture-- to a better place. After much soul-searching, that’s the conclusion I came to. Not that Euronymous ruined everything because he wrote lyrics that inspired people to violence (the movie couldn’t be less interested in his music, and you can’t make out the lyrics in any case) but that he built a subculture which brought out the worst in people, used them for his own self-gratification. His original sin was not an interest in loud music and morbid subjects, it was using the death of his friend as a marketing stunt. And he didn’t even do that because he was a heartless psychopath, but because, ultimately, he was a “bit of a sweetheart,” but alas, one too cowardly and juvenile to deal with his feelings directly. That weakness, and the need for a cartoonishly exaggerated show of strength to cover it over, was the poison that curdled a subculture that could have, under different circumstances, really helped people.

After all, this is ultimately about outcasts who are desperately in need of a home. Abele wondered why the movie doesn't explore "what made this corrosive clique so magnetic to its adherents." But isn't it obvious? These kids were feelings isolated and and alienated and unwanted in a small, homogeneous country that didn't offer much space for social misfits. Of course they leapt at the chance to find some acceptance within a community of kindred spirits. Most people, and especially most young people, experience this feeling to some extent, but for some --like the maladroit social rejects we find here-- it's much more intense and more difficult to achieve, and consequently can be almost all-consuming. A deep and unrequited need for connection and community is a powerful force, and people desperate enough will do almost anything to find it and hold onto it... making them easy targets for more self-serving community leaders with their own interests in mind. 

This is the simple, sad why behind all the aberrent behavior LORDS OF CHAOS chronicles. It’s not for nothing that the first time we see Varg, he’s no threat to anyone, he’s just an awkward kid sitting by himself, trying to get up the courage to go talk to the cool guys. And the first thing Euronymous does is casually cut him down, sending him shame-faced back to his lonely corner. Obviously Varg is responsible for his own actions, and at some point crosses lines that no one is going to be able to bring him back from. But one act of casual cruelty begets another. The Vargs of the world don’t start out as bad seeds. The thing that makes them scary is that they’re so normal and pathetic. There’s nothing special about them, and that’s why no one ever sees them coming. Their flaws are mundane; flaws we could even be sympathetic to if they didn’t end up twisting into something so hateful. But one can’t help but think: what if Euronymous had been a little nicer? What if he hadn’t been so up his own ass on a power trip as the leader of his gang, what if he’d just learned to relax and enjoy living his dream on his parent’s dime, and offered a little acceptance and community instead of callous derision designed to feed his own ego? Straight society thought Mayhem’s loud music and scary makeup and morbid fixations were signs that they were deviant and dangerous. But the truth was something much more mundane: the only thing that made them dangerous was that they were selfish assholes, and one selfish asshole begets another. And if no one stops the cycle --especially where young men are concerned-- sometimes things end up getting really, really out of hand.

 LORDS OF CHAOS was originally slated to be directed by Sion Sono, who would almost certainly have made an amazing, intense movie out of the material, as he always does. But having someone who came from this world behind the camera gives the version we got a perspective that I don’t know that Sono would have understood. So much of the world of Mayhem is about aggressive provocations, about an art and aesthetic which are so extreme that they seem like they could only meaningfully address huge, abstract concepts. It’s easy to look at their art, and then at the extreme violence which ultimately invaded their real lives, and assume you’ve stumbled upon some dark, hidden underworld completely unfamiliar to outsiders. But Åkerlund deftly dissipates that kind of mythologizing with a sobering reminder that there’s nothing at all special about these guys, except that they really did make some pretty baller metal. Other than that, this exact thing could have happened to anyone. There was nothing epic about it, nothing unique, just ordinary, immature, insecure idiots bringing out the worst in each other. So maybe don’t be such an asshole all the time, and don’t reward other people for being assholes, and then we might just help build a world where we can all enjoy brutal-ass True Norwegian Black Metal and have ourselves a good time without hurting anyone. Surely that’s not too much to ask?

Like True Norwegian Black Metal itself, the movie works best as a blunt-force instrument, and is consequently blind to subtler wrinkles here (the irony of people who loathe their country and its culture becoming ethno-nationalists is utterly lost on it). But as a perfectly honed poison-pen letter to some real toxic assholes, tempered with just enough empathy to never lose sight of the fact that for all their problems, they were still just dumb kids, I can’t really imagine a better version of this same material. LORDS OF CHAOS may not be a great movie, and it may not even be a movie which has a lot of resonance to people who never thought much about extreme metal culture to begin with. But at least for me, here and now, it’s a movie that feels both uniquely prescient and deeply necessary right at this moment.

                                                            FIN

* Now out of prison and living in France, a country which happily welcomed this white nationalist arsonist and murderer and then had the audacity to complain about African immigrants.

Death By Dialogue

"horror"

Death By Dialogue (1988)

Dir. and written by Tom DeWier.*

Starring Ken Sagoes, Laura Albert, Lenny Delducca (spelled “Delduca” in the credits), Jude Gerard, Kelly Sullivan, Judy Gordon, Ted Lehmann (spelled “Lehman”). Jeez, were these credit-writers paying for extra consonants out of pocket or something?

After giving up on 1997’s promising-on-paper BLOODLETTING approximately 5 minutes in, when it became clear it was filmed on someone’s camcorder and all the director’s friends would be speaking in fake accents, I approached this last-minute substitute pretty skeptically. And that skepticism only grew with the unexpected Troma logo at the beginning. A movie that’s crappy and incompetent is one thing, a movie that’s crappy and incompetent on purpose is quite another. But thankfully, DEATH BY DIALOGUE is clearly more the former than the latter (and those were absolutely the only two possibilities). It’s unrelentingly crappy and incompetent, and may, in fact, be shot on video, but my anxieties were quickly relieved when it had a fog machine and a guy getting lit on fire in the first five minutes. So I figured we’d be OK. This would be endurable.

And endurable it is, give or take your pain threshold for low-rent, badly mic’d, indecipherably plotted, inadequately framed, inanely acted 80’s pablum where the biggest star is fifth-billed in a NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequel (Ken Sagoes, Kincaid from DREAM WARRIORS and DREAM MASTER, not even trying hard enough to stand out in a cast of largely first-time actors, thought I’m looking at his filmography right now and hey, he’s actually had a respectable career post-NIGHTMARE, appearing in ROSEWOOD and even a Coen Bros film).** A good test of whether or not you’ll survive the runtime is to gauge your reaction to the opening credits, wherein we will endure the entirety of the magnificently shitty wuss metal anthem “Night of Our Lives” by a band called “Azha.”

I’ve looked extensively for the lyrics or anything else about this band, and, finding nothing, I feel it’s my duty as a journalist to record here, for the first time online, the lyrics to what appears to be one of only two extant recordings by Azha, comprising between them the only available evidence I can hunt down that such a group ever existed (the other is the title track from the 1990 gangster cheapie EMPEROR OF THE BRONX).

Night Of Our Lives (1988[?])

Written and Performed by Azha

Lyrics by Azha and John Gonzalez (who is also the film’s composer)

Produced by John Gonzalez

Gonna have a good time/ looking for some fun /

I’m riding with my baby / We’re the lucky ones

Rockin and a’ rollin in a club downtown / cruising the street with the pop top down/

Just got paid it’s a Friday night / got a feelin that the evening’s gonna turn out right

On the..  

Night of our lives! (x4)

Lose your soul to rock and roll / party down and lose control /

getting up and getting out / getting crazy scream and shout

(rockin’ guitar solo interlude)

Rocking and rolling feelin the heat / Ground is shakin right on to your feet [?] /

gonna raise hell like never before / Gonna party til we just can’t party no more.

On the..  

Night of our lives! (x4)

[reprise] Lose your soul to rock and roll / party down and lose control /

getting up and getting out / getting crazy scream and shout

On the..  

Night of our lives! (x4)

If you can get to the end of the opening credits, you have either settled in for a campy, airheaded lark, or you’ve degenerated into a raging, drooling homicidal maniac, in which case it’s unlikely that you’re still reading this, so I’ll address the remainder of this review to the former category.

            This is the tale of a group of long-haired wussy 80s types --it's impossible to know how many for sure, it might be as few as four or as many as 60-- and their girlfriends and their one black friend (Ken Sagoes) who show up and make themselves at home at someone’s uncle’s house unannounced, which is either something people used to do back in the 80s, or, more likely, something that nobody ever did, which would put it closer in line with the rest of the ostensible human behavior we will observe during the course of the movie. Uncle Ive (Ted Lehmann, various TV shows going back to the 50’s including V, Matlock, Dynasty, and the 80’s Twilight Zone revival) and his vaguely defined live-in companion “Ms. Camden” (Judy Gordon, “waitress” on one of the 600 episodes of the long-running BBC series Grange Hill) are openly hostile to their presence there, and seem to be implying there is some great danger without saying it directly. And also, our heroes find a charred corpse on the property within minutes of arriving, before they’ve even unloaded their stuff from the car. But none of this seems to dampen their enthusiasm for their country vacation, as evidenced by an extensive volleyball montage (recycling footage we saw literally seconds before) which then segues into another montage where they play with the volleyball while running around off-court.

            A long day of volleyball montages deserves a night of existential rumination on the subject of death, and so our gang quickly gets down to it, waxing philosophical while watching “One of those old classic horror films.”

"Isn’t this the one where the woman gets her head chopped off with an axe?”

“Ugh yeah”

“Oh Gene, you gotta see this one. This woman gets her head chopped off with an axe!”

This leads to a lengthy philosophical discussion on the experience of death, culminating with one of the guys standing up and gesticulating grandly,

“Think about it! I mean, think about it! Imagine getting your head cut off…. Come on, think about it! I mean, you’re sitting there with no head. You can’t see shit. There’s blood all over the place. Come on, think about it! I really wonder what that would be like! … Man, you think about it. Because I’m serious."

(Man, this guy really want us to think about it.)

“Well I wouldn’t want to die that way,” says his friend, defensively, maybe a little apologetically. “I mean, I’ve thought about this.” (How could you not, with this guy so insistent on the point?)

“I don’t know about you guys, but there is just no way I want to die,” chimes in another friend, controversially. “I mean, I’ve never thought about it and I’m not going to.” (oh man, she's gonna have problems with Mr. Philosopher). She shrugs, also a little apologetically. “There’s just no way I want to die.”

Now, all this talk of chopping heads off with axes (come on, think about it!) would, in any other movie, be allowable, if unusually on-the-nose, foreshadowing of a character’s death. But this is not any other movie. This is God Damned DEATH BY DIALOGUE. So yes, an axe-related death will come into play, but not the way you think.

Allow me to explain: at 31:02 minutes in (thanks, youtube comments, I got you), the movie figures you deserve a little reward for making it this far, and so two of the dozens or hundreds of indistinguishable white people wander off to an abandoned hayloft to fuck. While this young lady wearing her underwear but no shirt writhes provocatively on top of this dude who is also wearing his underwear and just sort of laying there, she suddenly gets flung out through a wall like a wrecking ball (I guess that’s what Miley was talking about?).

This unexpected turn of events prompts her partner to shout, while putting his clothes back on in frustration, “what the fuck is going on!?" (a question we, the audience, can very much relate to) and also serves as musical cue for a song called “When The Axe Comes Down.” (Ah, you see? Axes!). "What the fuck is going on!?" turns out to be something of an understatement, because as he stumbles through the woods searching for his lost paramour, he comes across a hair metal band (presumably the credited “Dirty Dogs”) actually playing “When the Axe Comes Down” out there in the goddamn woods (affording me a prime opportunity to casually demonstrate I know what “diegetic” means). The Dirty Dogs strut around while he stares at them in awe of their godlike musical prowess, finish the song, and then blow up his head with the power of their rock. So this movie is automatically pretty good. At 35 minutes we’ve had murderous hair metal wizards blow up a guy (I don’t think we ever find out what happened to his girl).

            By the way, I could find no more evidence to support the existence of the “Dirty Dogs” or “When The Axe Comes Down” writer/producer Michael McMahon than I could for the mysterious “Azha” (wikipedia lists no fewer than 13 “Michael McMahon”s, among them football players, Australian football players, politicians, Australian politicians, hockey players, Australian rugby players, and wheelchair racers. Seriously, like half of all Australians are named Michael McMahon, I think. But none of them appears to be this guy).*** But having already wasted nearly two hours trying in vain to find some tiny particle of interesting trivia on these two bands, I was finally rewarded for my efforts:  

            Notice anything unusual about those credits? Go on, have a look. I’ll wait.

            That’s right, this track was engineered by none other than Brett Gurewitz, founder of the seminal LA hardcore punk band Bad Religion, and president and founder of venerable punk label Epitaph records. When DEATH BY DIALOGUE premiered in November of 1988, Bad Religion would have been freshly galvanized by the release of their big comeback record Suffer after a five-year absence from the scene. So I’m not sure when he’d have had time to engineer this rinky-dink hair-metal track for a Z-grade horror movie, but hey, everyone’s gotta make that rent. And hey, 2nd engineer Donnell Cameron would go on to be a producer and engineer for Sublime, Blink-182, and Avenged Sevenfold, among others. The two were co-owners of Westbeach Recorders (which in 1988 had just moved to its final home on Hollywood Boulevard), so I guess that explains what they’re doing here. For the record, the engineering seems fine.

            Anyway, right around this time, we’re showing some warning signs that some kind of plot might be developing, because one of the blondes finds a script titled Victim 67 laying around, and starts to obsessively read it when she notices that her friends are all characters in it. (Oddly, she never explains what the script is actually about, just that everyone is in it. No mention of a plot of any kind, just a few isolated descriptions of incidents that occur, with no context whatsoever. Which actually might shed some light on the scripting process for this movie). Nobody else seems to find this very interesting, and in fact they all keep telling her how sick they are of her bringing it up. Even after three of their friends die in exactly the manner the script describes, and she notices that the title has changed to Victim 70. It is then that she realizes the horrible truth:

“This script is killing everybody! Gene and Linda, too.” 

Confronted with the evidence that this is some kind of cursed murder script, Uncle Ive confesses everything in one of the most rambling and bizarre origin stories I’ve ever heard. It's too longwinded for me to transcribe directly, but the general plots points are these: many years ago, an unnamed journalist was pestering a native Amazonian tribe about taking their photo, so much so, in fact, that they killed him. But then he haunted them, and so they put his ashes in a ceremonial urn, and that seemed to solve the problem. But then for some reason they gave the urn to Uncle Ive, who brought it back home as a “perfect addition to my pre-Columbian art collection” (note to Uncle Ive: might be worth looking up the definition of “Pre-Columbian”). Then, in the 1950s, his housekeeper opened up the urn while dusting and the “evil spirit was freed from its captivity, and the life force of that spirit harbored itself in the script of the film that was being done here at the time.” The IMDB plot synopsis claims the movie takes place “next to a movie set,” though I see no evidence of that in the actual film, so I guess that explains everything. Here’s the thing, though; Uncle Ive may well be the most interesting man in the world, but I can’t help but think that a backstory about an evil script should, you know, have something to do with writing a script or making films or something. What's up with the Amazonian tribe and the pesky journalist and all that? It seems like there’s gotta be more to that story, right? Let's try and stay on-theme here, guys.

Unfortunately just as it should start to pick up, the movies slows way down, with some endless chit-chat about what to do about the whole haunted script thing, and then some girl has a slow motion dream about a guy driving up in a race car, and then she takes her top off and they kiss and then she pulls his scarf away and his head falls off, which, I dunno dude, that would probably be more fun if it took thirty seconds instead of thirty years. These people just talk too slow and they pause between lines a little too long for this to have any momentum. People repeat specific lines of dialogue two or three times quite often, imparting a more than passing impression of a TV program aimed at toddlers. Part of the problem is that they must have spent their whole movie budget on those sweet ass metal songs, because the rest is uncomfortably silent, really highlighting how slow-moving all the dialogue is. Death by dialogue indeed.

 Fortunately in the final half-hour, things start to pick up a bit. Some sort of full-body gargoyle suit turns up, which is cool. Then it disappears, boo. A bit later, a big bald guy with a cape and a sword (Possibly stuntman Mark Ginther [best known as the wolf guy in TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES 2], but I can't say for sure, because the credits list four "Evil Spirit" actors) shows up and stabs somebody. Always a welcome turn of events, but after the bait-and-switch with the gargoyle, I was cautious to fall in love again. As it gradually becomes clear that this bald sword guy is in for the long haul, however, I was able to relax and emotionally invest in him. Pretty soon Baldy uses sword swinging to conjure a bunch of fire and explosions behind him which looks metal as fuck, and also he summons two cronies on motorcycles (shades of MANDY?). I have no idea who this dude is, but I’m 100% on board with his jam. If I could offer this mystery murder script that killed everybody including Gene and Linda some notes, though, I would suggest that this character “Bald Sword Guy” would have had more impact if he was established as the main villain any time before the final 20 minutes. He arrives way too late, but I admire his willingness to show up and get right down to business without any need for tedious introductions. He starts by offing Ms. Camden, who for the whole movie has seemed really sketchy and like she knows more than she’s saying, but I guess not because that’s the end of her. Later he gets his leg blown off with a shotgun in slow motion.

What any of this has to do with the ashes of a pushy National Geographic reporter or an evil script that controls destiny, I do not know. What I do know is that there’s a sweet-ass back-flip motorcycle jump that gets blown up by a shotgun in mid-air, but this movie is still somehow pretty boring. Which really makes the concept of a cursed script seem a lot more believable.

In the end... uh, it's kinda hard to describe, actually. Like, a grave explodes and the big Bald Guy jumps out, and then I think a motorcycle zips by, and then there’s a cut to the moon, and then to some tombstones, which seems to indicate that time has passed, but I guess not because the next shot shows everybody right where they were, except that Bald Guy is no longer visible. Then he sort of stumbles at them from off-screen, and then they say a prayer over the grave, and he disappears. I’m not sure exactly what this means or specifically what occurred because it’s edited into total incomprehensibility, but that seems to solve things, and everybody wanders off into the woods mumbling, roll credits. I kinda thought the problem was supposed to be some kind of cursed movie script, but nobody has mentioned it for awhile and whatever they did with the grave seemed to do the trick. Maybe the script was buried there?

I think it says something about this movie that it has an explosion and a motorcycle stunt, but then the whole sequence just ends with the anticlimax of a guy disappearing. DEATH BY DIALOGUE is full of real howlers and wild ridiculous nonsense, but by all logic should add up to more fun than it does. I appreciate any movie where a bald guy with a sword and his affiliated gang of zombie bikers can show up out of nowhere at any moment, but if you can’t build any momentum, it doesn’t matter. It still feels like kinda a slog. Albeit, a slog where sometimes people do sick bike tricks in front of fire, which is admittedly one of the more enjoyable species of slogs. Director/writer Tom DeWeir directed just one more movie, 1990’s Troma-released action flick CONTRA CONSPIRACY, but mostly thereafter stuck to his main job, as a stunt player with (as of this writing) 181 credited movies, including such diverse fare as CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, MORTAL KOMBAT, G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA, THE RUINS, INLAND EMPIRE (!!!), JACK FROST 1 & 2, BIO-DOME, THE END OF VIOLENCE, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER (where he probably met Ken Sagoe and convinced him this would be a good idea), BATMAN RETURNS, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, HELLRAISER:BLOODLINES, EDTV and, um, POISON IVY. And THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS. So if I’m gonna make fun of how crappy this movie is, I gotta take on a dude who worked with David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Tim Burton, John Carpenter, and Pauly Shore.

I’m obviously not going to be able to do that, so let’s just say DEATH BY DIALOGUE falls into the “vaguely watchable with an appropriate compliment of catty friends and strong drink” category of the Troma oeuvre, which is an elite enough company that it can probably hold its head up with pride and say a few words. Not that it would mic them well enough that you could make them out.

* IMDB also credits someone named Susan Trabue (only one other credit, as a producer on the sketchily-attested-to 1996 comedy SHOOT THE MOON, which has no images and only one review and no other evidence online that it ever existed) with “script and additional dialogue.” She’s not credited on-screen, but I have to imagine she really did contribute something here, because otherwise why on Earth would anyone take credit for being part of this turkey? The only other explanation I can think of is that she’s somebody’s ex and they attributed this movie to her out of spite.

** OK, It’s INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, but still. Since we’re talking about Sagoes here, I’d also like to point out that his IMDB biography claims he’s “written fourteen plays and over thirty-five screenplays” (IMDB credits him for seven, including two episodes of Laverne and Shirley[!]). It also claims he “studied under two entertainment legends, Edmund J. Cambridge and Marlon Brando.” If his performance in DEATH BY DIALOGUE is any indication, he must have missed a few of those classes with Brando, but hey, sounds like an interesting life, and I will always love the guy for being the most entertaining person in the already very entertaining NEVER SLEEP AGAIN documentary (yes, even better than Dokken). Also, I feel this is worth noting:

*** I thought for a while they might the the “Dirty Dogs” out of Colorado profiled in this New Vulgate article. The timing was over a decade off, though, and though they did have a “Mike” there was no “McMahon.” There’s also a German Metal band (see them in, um, action, here) of the same name from the late 70’s, but no such track, and no member named “McMahon.”

...But I did find a website devoted to a character named “Betsy Bitch” who is touted as the “First Lady Of American Metal” which claims Betsy at some point worked with a fellow named “Jay Dean.” Dean’s bio on this website claims he also played with a band called “The Dirty Dogs” who sound like a tantalizingly close match: “The Dirty Dogs were part of the late 80’s/early 90’s wave of Sunset Strip Scene metal bands that followed in Guns n’ Roses’ wake... In their brief period together (1988-1990), The Dirty Dogs became one of the top-drawing acts in the Hollywood club scene, packing out legendary venues like The Whiskey-a-Go-Go, The Coconut Teaser, and Club Lingerie. At different points the band included Jay Dean, Fred Gordon, Mickey MacMahan, Randy Scarbeary, Tim English, and Nate Winger (brother of Kip Winger). [Their 1988] three-song demo was produced by Beau Hill, producer for Ratt, Winger, and Alice Cooper amongst others. Apparently the band just missed being signed to A&M Records after the demo was recorded. The band recorded another demo after Jay left the band in 1989, and the tracks from that demo are featured on The Dirty Dogs’ official MySpace.” Note the presence of a Mickey “MacMahan” (not “Mickey McMahon,” as the credits list, but it’s gotta be the same guy, right?). The time and place is right, and the general description sounds so close that it’s gotta be more than a coincidence. Unfortunately their original Myspace page is gone, and no other information on this band appears to be available online.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	The current DVD box just says “Horror” and that’s it, which makes me think they wrote that in as a placeholder while they tried to think of a tagline, and then forgot and never replaced it. But the original posters says: Ken Sagoes, the kid who survived “Nightmare On Elm Street 3” is Back! Which places this squarely in the Sagoesploitation genre.
TITLE ACCURACY	They don’t show the script, but I imagine it’s stage directions, rather than dialogue, that does the killing. But never mind.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Troma movie
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Ken Sagoes? It’s a pretty thin record to qualify him as an icon, but apparently they believed in him as a horror draw enough to put his name in the tagline.
NUDITY?	Unbelievably, they actually got not one but two women topless for this movie.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Haunted...screenplay?
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	The story is too incoherent to really posit a moral, but I guess the lesson is, hey guys, let’s get Ken Sagoes in a few more movies here.